Facts and opinions related to the reprographics business and the reprographics industry as well as articles and information related to the A/E/C industry served by reprographers. This blog is intended for reprographers, for vendors who sell to reprographers and for analysts and investors who are interested in learning more about the reprographics industry. (YOU CAN CONTACT THE BLOG AUTHOR at joel.salus@mac.com or at joel.salus@me.com)

Reprographers, I took just a few minutes to look though the list of services that bidders are asked to bid on, and, folks, this bid document is one of the worst ones that I’ve come across in the past few years.This City, home to MIT and Harvard no less, appears be quite backwards; one wonders if the purchasing department did any homework, at all, on the services it needs and how to appropriately describe the services it needs.Here are some of the line items and my comments about each.

- Diazo blackline prints

How many reprographers in the Boston/Cambridge area still offer diazo printing services, and, even if any of them do, why in the world is this service even necessary in this day and age?

How in the world is anyone supposed to provide a unit price for this line item without an understanding of the media-type required?

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Joel’s final comments on this Bid document:

This Bid document is a perfect example of bids in the past that used to make me cringe, literally!Fraught with inaccurate (or, worse, stupid) line item descriptions and services that are obsolete.Shame on the City’s Purchasing Department for not reaching out to area reprographics vendors for assistance and guidance in updating/revising/modernizing the City’s bid procurement for reprographics services.And, shame on Boston area reprographers for not educating the City’s purchasing department on current reprographics technology and services!

I’ve uploaded a copy of the bid document to my Google-Docs library; here’s the link:

1 comment:

As a Cambridge resident, I can assure you they are that backwards. It comes as a great surprise to outsiders, but those of us who live here and care about municipal government and its services, can point to item after item where the city is living in the past. There are a small group of City Councilors who understand this but, given our form of government, their influence is small.

(I have no idea how this ended up in my RSS feed, but I consider it the good serendipity of the day.)

Archive of Blog-posts on Repro 101 when Repro 101 was hosted on IRgA web-site

To access the archive of blog posts that were put up on Reprographics 101 when Repro 101 was hosted on the IRgA web-site, go to the blog-post put up on May 31st, 2013, and, when you locate that blog-post, you will find a list of the pdf files that contain those previous blog-posts, as well as "links" to each pdf file.

About Me

40+ year involvement in the reprographics business and industry. Former Chairman/CEO of Rowley-Scher Reprographics, Former Senior Vice President & Chief Business Strategist of National Graphic Imaging (NGI). Former Managing Director of the International Reprographics Association (IRgA). Active as a Management Consultant to firms in the reprographics business. (My consulting practice is called ProActive Management Programs LLC.)